Revue
Nouvelle parution
French Studies, vol. 62, no 3 (juillet 2008)

French Studies, vol. 62, no 3 (juillet 2008)

Publié le par Gabriel Marcoux-Chabot (Source : Site web de la maison d'édition)

French Studies is published on behalf of the Society forFrench Studies. The journal publishes articles and reviews spanning allareas of the subject, including language and linguistics (historicaland contemporary), all periods and aspects of literature in France andthe French-speaking world, thought and the history of ideas, culturalstudies, film, and critical theory

French Studies, Vol. 62, no3 (juillet 2008)

Maria Scott
Performing Desire : Stendhal's Theatrical Heroines
Stendhal's independent heroines, often associated with a taste for the theatrical, do not tend to win the preference of his male heroes. As a result, they are often considered by critics to be less successful than their more traditionally ‘feminine' counterparts in achieving their goals. However, this paper argues that characters such as Mathilde de La Mole, la Sanseverina, Lamiel, Mina Wanghen and Mina de Vanghel achieve a level of control over their own destinies unknown to Stendhal's more retiring heroines, such Mme de Rênal, Clélia Conti, Mme de Chasteller and Armance. Consequently, the author's less ‘natural' female characters turn out in fact to be more authentic, in existential terms at least, than their more traditional sisters. The authenticity of these heroines, interpreted here as their success in defining themselves as subjects rather than objects of desire, is shown by this article to be related, somewhat paradoxically, to their interest in theatrical fakery. In making this argument, the paper engages with the ideas of, among others, Simone de Beauvoir and Jacques Lacan.

Irene Albers
Mimesis and Alterity : Michel Leiris's Ethnography and Poetics of Spirit Possession
The title of Leiris's diary L'Afrique fantôme has mostly been understood as a critique of European Africanist discourse. However, Leiris does a lot more than just denounce (his own) exoticism. This article argues that the title of his diary has to be read with reference to the French Surrealist and ethnographer's experience during his stay in Gondar while studying the zar, a popular cult of spirit possession. These ecstatic cults have been described as performing a mimetic relation to alterity (Taussig) or as an ‘interpretation of the Other by mimesis' (Kramer). Re-enacting the Other leads to a liberation from its power by means of imitation. It is shown that this corresponds to Leiris's own retrospective studies of the zar cult as a cathartic externalization of alterity and as a theatre of alterity. In his failed search for a truly sacral, authentically primitive or salutary ritual, Leiris above all discovered one particular ritual: writing, ‘poésie'. This refers to what now appears as a European form of spirit possession developing its own rituals — rituals of conjuring ‘phantoms' as well as ones of defence and exorcism. In Leiris, the conjuring (as well as the therapy) becomes a literary domain, whereas the banishment of the phantom is the domain of theory or research. Talking as one who is possessed and talking about possession, inseparably linked in the diary, are associated with discourses of autobiographical self-description and ethnographic description of otherness, of ‘expérience poétique' and ‘étude ethnologique'.

Julia Dobson
Timely Resistance in the Documentary Work of Dominique Cabrera
Dominique Cabrera's oeuvre attests to a consistent preoccupation with the representation and construction of a bonheur collectif. Through a detailed analysis of two documentary films, Chronique d'une banlieue ordinaire (1992) and Demain et encore demain (journal 1995) (1997), this article will reveal her adoption of the documentary as a therapeutic form in opposition to dominant Griersonian modes of documentary that counter the potential empowerment of representation with the conferral of victimhood on its subjects. Cabrera's films avoid such heritages through their insistence on a formal mise en abyme of documentary processes to perform a réinsertion sociale of the stigmatized communities of Val Fourré and a moving réinsertion temporelle of the filmmaker herself in the first-person confessional Demain et encore demain. This mise en abyme includes a meditation on the ontology of the photographic image and its pervasive relationship with mortality; both films sensitize their audience to the relationship between image, time and narrative. Such arguments are presented within the context of the dramatic increase in production of (first-person) documentary in contemporary France and the current crisis of legitimization in the conventional documentary form.

Pascale Sardin
Towards an Ethics of Witness, or the Story and History of ‘une minuscule détresse' in Annie Ernaux's L'Événement and Nancy Huston's Instruments des ténèbres
This paper investigates what is at stake, ethically and aesthetically, in writing about the disturbing issues of abortion and neonaticide. It focuses on L'Événement by Annie Ernaux and on Nancy Huston's Instruments des ténèbres. Though very different in form and content, these two novels, written from a distinctively female viewpoint, are metatextual works which reflect on the act of writing such taboos, and of representing irrational, defective mothers in the context of poststructuralism and postmodernism. In her exploration of the genre of the memoir and that of historiography as defined by Paul Ricoeur, Ernaux seeks a form of writing which discards pathos and the moral involvement of the reader, while Huston attempts something similar through humour and the grotesque. Yet at the same time, these novelists renegotiate the notion of retelling experience as defined by Walter Benjamin in ‘The storyteller' — the rewriting of the chronology of excruciating events, drawing a parallel between private and public history. In this perspective, their depiction of dark mothers, which goes against the comforting myth of the good mother, reads as a political and humanistic project. Ernaux's and Huston's respective aesthetics define a new kind of ethics involving the reader and centring on the notion of witness, exhorting their readers to undertake a performative reading.

Elin Beate Tobiassen
Promenades de lecteurs dans Le Vaillant Petit Tailleur d'Éric Chevillard
Le roman Le Vaillant Petit Tailleur d'Éric Chevillard (2003), écrivain dont la production figure peut-être parmi les oeuvres en prose les plus notoires de la littérature française actuelle, a été perçu par la critique comme une attaque sévère contre la forme traditionnelle du conte de fées. Explorant une nouvelle piste, cet article aborde le roman sous l'angle de la réception littéraire, argumentant que la préoccupation cruciale de son narrateur-auteur est au contraire celle qui consiste à inventer un lecteur de son propre texte. Qui est ce lecteur en jeu dans l'oeuvre? Quel(s) lecteur(s) ce texte se présume-t-il? Quelles figures de lecteurs imagine-t-il au fil des pages? Et quelle place cette oeuvre métatextuelle, intelligemment agencée, demandant recul, ruse, et perspicacité de la part de son lecteur, laisse-t-elle à la jouissance, à l'envoûtement? L'analyse du Vaillant Petit Tailleur sous cette lumière inédite permet de reconsidérer l'attitude distanciée souvent attribuée au lecteur de la métafiction moderne. S'il est un écrivain tenant d'une conception ‘intellectuelle' du roman, refusant l'immersion mimétique à l'égard du personnage au profit d'un développement excessif du potentiel réflexif du texte, Chevillard est pourtant fort loin de vouer son lecteur à l'abstinence du plaisir.